Business data is a source of valuable information and provides a competitive advantage if the data is quickly and accurately analyzed. Finding valuable information hidden in large amounts of data, though, is quite challenging since such information is concealed in the data. Visual data comparison techniques are extremely useful for revealing such valuable information hidden in data.
Prior visual data comparison techniques include simple graphical techniques, such as bar charts, pie charts, and x-y charts. These simple graphical techniques are easy to use but offer limited information, especially for visually evaluating specific content in large amounts of business data. For example, simple bar charts or pie charts show highly aggregated data. Regular bar charts do show aggregated data, such as average value or median value.
Traditional bar charts show aggregated information using bars that have varying heights. In an x-y axis bar chart, the height of a bar corresponds to a value of an attribute on the y-axis, while the x-axis designates categories for each of the bars.